Mike Kelley Memorial Tribute

“Kandor Bottle 13,” a video projection from 2007, will be in an exhibition of Mike Kelley’s works opening at the Watermill Center during its benefit on Saturday night.
Deichtorhallen Hamburg/Sammlung Falckenberg

The Watermill Center will present a show of the work of the California artist Mike Kelley, who died this year, beginning at its benefit on Saturday night. The tribute to the artist will be open through Sept. 16, by appointment on the center’s Web site. A $20 donation will be suggested; $10 for students.
The exhibition, organized by Harald Falckenberg, a Kelley expert, is being presented in collaboration with the Luma Foundation. It ranges from early soundtrack and video works from the late ’70s and ’80s through Kelley’s more recent “Kandor” project, based on the Superman comic series. The show will take over the building’s south wing.
The artist was known for his use of discarded objects and “low” materials to create complicated and often scatological compositions, with stuffed animals as sculptural objects. He also produced videos, paintings, wall drawings, and installations of complicated environments such as offices or restaged historical events. A major retrospective is planned for Amsterdam, and will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2014.
Tomorrow, the center will also benefit from a screening of the film “Heaartbeat,” a documentary on John Chamberlain, to be shown at the Art Southampton fair. The event will help launch the Watermill Center/John Chamberlain Residency Fund to benefit the center’s year-round Artist Residency Program, which provides a setting and support for young and emerging artists to explore and develop their work. Susan Davidson, the curator of the Chamberlain retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum this past spring, will speak about the artist’s life and work.